My own personal bias vis-a-vis living history

On a completely different note, I want to talk about two ways of enacting history, and my bias about them. First, you got your history-killing Olde-Tymey-ness. This is when you try to reenact historical artforms just as they were, down to the clothes and styles, etc. I call this history-killing because it freezes things into a period and stifles them there. It makes the period itself the showcase, rather than the art that flowed through it. I get most annoyed with this in music, because it just so happens I am really into acoustic instruments, but this buts me up against so much Olde-Tymey-ness I could puke on your suspenders and washboards. Cuz see, my bias is towards the second way of enacting history, which is radically directed at the individual artwork and its enduring message in today's society. No need to beat around the bush here, I am talking mostly about silent film, and the way plenty of those movies are awesome and plenty of them suck, and how that distinction is being lost by their historical fetishization by Olde-Tymey-ists. Each film before and after sound is its own deal, and putting them all to shitty ass old ragtimey huzzah music just dilutes the good ones and makes the bad ones even worse. To reenact movie history, you have to take the movies seriously as though they were made today, and part of that is playing music that is relevant today. It's like the difference between baby-talking to kids or treating them as real honest-to-god people. I get pissed about this issue because to me it is a matter of respect, and my bias is that respect is important, and you disrespect history when you fetishize it and parade it the way Olde-Tymyists do.

So I guess I'm saying there are things within the arts that endure and things that don't, and making that classic argument about how styles change but substance stays the same. Wow, I never thought I'd be that guy, but I guess in my older age that is what I believe.

There is an element of tragedy to historical style-peddlers, because it takes incredible talent to recreate a style, but that talent seems wasted to me when it parades the dead for the living, instead of trying to create something that will have life long after the maker is dead.